Wiley:
Looking to ourselves to curb terrorism[continued from
previous
page]

In an op-ed piece he published in the New
York Times in May 2005, Pape wrote: "Before Israel’s invasion of
Lebanon in 1982, there was no Hezbollah suicide terrorist campaign
against Israel; indeed, Hezbollah came into existence only after
this event. And, true to form, there had never been a documented
suicide attack in Iraq until after the American invasion in 2003."

He goes
on to say that the presence of American combat forces in the Arab
peninsula since the early 1990s, as well as the war in Iraq is
certainly a reason why new attacks have happened. "And the longer
this suicide terrorist campaign continues, the greater the risk of
new attacks in the United States," he wrote.

A
reader from Sweden left her enthusiastic impressions of Pape’s book
on Amazon and added: "As Noam Chomsky once brilliantly pointed out:
Unless we judge our own actions by the same standards we apply to
others, we can never talk about justice. Unless we acknowledge the
root causes of terrorism and unless we avoid making sensationalistic
albeit incorrect and grossly oversimplified conclusions, then
eradicating terrorism will be extremely difficult."

I
couldn’t agree more and I hope that all of us will go beyond our
superficial conversations of our hand luggage discomforts to take a
stand on what matters. Pape suggests the United States could go back
to "offshore balancing" in the Persian Gulf. He wrote: "Keeping the
peace from a discreet distance seems a better way to secure our
interests in the world’s key oil-producing region without provoking
more terrorism."

(Miryam
Wiley is a freelance columnist published on Saturdays in the Daily
News. Her e-mail is inamericacolumn@aol.com.)